Messager de Lune

“Should we speak of overpainting, painted replicas, or appropriation art? What, if anything, are we supposed to unpack here? Are we looking at objets trouvés, readymades, or rectified readymades?" Moritz Scheper in Artforum, 2023.

Since 2020, Laurent Dupont has been working on a series of cardboard boxes that play with a trompe-l'oeil effect: packaging for marshmallows and fortune cookies, but also for fragile objects and confidential documents of the European Parliament. At first glance, the boxes look like typical readymades − ordinary objects plucked from everyday life and placed in an exhibition context. But a closer look reveals irregularities and an unusual texture, very different from the printed cardboard we know. Every single box has been painstakingly painted by hand, down to the last detail.

Laurent Dupont strips the cardboard boxes of their original function, as it were, and turns them into pictorial simulations of themselves. He recasts them as stand-alone "paintings/sculptures", questioning the link between the act of painting and the creation of meaning and value.